A class of its own

From November 22 to 24, 2024, the Northwestern Europe Regional Contest (NWERC) took place in Delft, Netherlands. Over 70 universities entered their best teams to compete in the field of algorithmic problem solving. KIT was one of the few universities allowed to compete with two teams due to its outstanding performance in the German preliminary round (GCPC), in which it took the first two places.

The best result in KIT's history at the NWERC
KIT's first team, Kindergarten Timelimit (Jonathan Dransfeld, Lucas Schwebler, Yidi Zang), was once again able to demonstrate its skills. After winning the GCPC, they also took first place at the NWERC - with an impressive performance: they solved two more tasks than the second-placed team and were the first team in eight years to successfully solve all 13 tasks in the competition. With this outstanding performance, they not only beat German competitors such as TU Munich, Saarland University and the Hasso Plattner Institute, but also top international universities such as TU Delft, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

The second team also shines: Infinite Loopers secure silver
It was not only the first team that caused a stir: KIT's second team, the Infinite Loopers (Lennart Blumenthal, Jonas Dalchow, Sebastian Kirmayer), also achieved an excellent placing after a year of intensive training. They came 6th out of a total of 80 teams and secured a well-deserved silver medal. This impressive result shows how successful the continuous preparation and teamwork of the KIT students are.
This year, KIT achieved the best performance of the university at the NWERC in the history of the competition. In particular, Kindergarten Timelimit also secures its participation in the Europe-wide competition and the World Finals next year, as it did last year. The problems with solutions can be found together with the final results here.

A strong team behind the success
The ICPC is considered one of the most important student programming competitions and is organized every year by the world's largest computer science society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The NWERC is the European preliminary round and decides who gets to go to the European and even the global final. The tasks at the ICPC range from tricky implementation tasks to tasks on the design and implementation of algorithms and data structures to algorithmic geometry and mathematics. Coordinated group work, wide-ranging knowledge, efficient and error-free work and the recognition of edge cases are particularly important in this competition.

Take part and become part of the team
Every summer semester, the group led by T.-T. Professor Thomas Bläsius offers Bachelor students an internship that prepares them for the competition and from which future participants are selected. More information can be found at https://icpc.iti.kit.edu or on the Discord server.

The next European finals will take place in Portugal in spring 2025, the ICPC World Finals are expected to take place in South America in 2025.

And in 2025, the NWERC will take place here in Karlsruhe - a great honor for KIT!